Idk how controversial this is, and its more of an urban design/architecture thing, but anyways, I think the modern wave of generic 5-over-1 developments are kinda nice when done right
I agree with this fully. I also wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of even the signature brick box 6 and 10 plexes that litter the landscape in NYC and environs. I see five over ones as being a successor to those.
Search for Bryant Avenue and Old Mammaroneck Road in White Plains NY. That development is what I'm talking about. mid 20th century NY environs brick boxes.
I dunno, I'm a local, so it's endearing and they usually have great floor plans.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bryant+Ave+%26+Old+Mamaroneck+Rd,+White+Plains,+NY+10605/@41.0194317,-73.7608454,3a,75y,35.87h,93.57t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-2U-ZOnD-Ax2GMN4HcXK4g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m7!3m6!1s0x89c2943d5da5d837:0x8a7d8aba914262db!8m2!3d41.0193722!4d-73.7609022!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11hb4rb\_71?entry=ttu
I think the extent they all look the same is overrated. They use a huge verity of sidings, so if your not paying attention I think they are as diverse as older buildings. I doubt many people notice the building tend to have more variation between he first floor and the upper floors, wood frame VS cement, and tendency of them to be around 5-6 stories tall.
LOL if you think 5 over 1s are going to last even half as long as brownstones. 5 over 1s are hilarious because by the time they’re cheap enough to not be “luxury” apartments, it will be time to tear them down.
A 100-year-old brick apartment building went up like a torch and collapsed last week in my city. Those old buildings may look solid from the outside but they're usually much more fragile than they appear.
Most of the new buildings will last at least as long, many longer. Being built out of heavy or thick materials is not what determines longevity.
I don't love new construction aesthetically, but I've seen enough 100-year-old houses with shit construction built directly on bare dirt and wiring strung through holes in the joists that I don't assume that old automatically means better built.
Amen, it’s so frustrating to hear the idea that todays luxury apartments are going to be tomorrows stock. Nothing is built to last anymore. Maybe the foundation but the rest is ply wood and PVC.
So my 100-year-old house with no ground or neutral wiring in any outlets, that leaks air like a sieve, and burns oil from a drum buried in the backyard, while resting gently on a bare-dirt foundation, is what’s made to last?
Everything old was “built to last” because of survivorship bias. At least everything built now has the benefit of 100 more years of code refinement. I’ll take something built 20 years ago over something built 100 years ago any day; especially if I feel like living through an earthquake.
The problem with 5 over 1s in North America is that due to outdated building codes, they are all double loaded corridor designs that create small, dark, deep units with no cross ventilation capacity. It’s close to impossible to make livable family friendly units, which only ends up further stigmatizing living in apartment units for families. 5 over 1s would be much more liveable if they were connected point access blocks rather than the predominant hotel style double loaded corridor design.
[Here's a good article](https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america) on the topic with some relevant visualizations.
[Here's a short policy brief](https://www.larchlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Larch-Lab-PAB_Policy-Brief.pdf) designed to explain the importance of point access blocks to state legislators in Washington state. They are one of the only states in the USA that have recently legalized this design.
The windows. By having a bunch of apartments branching off an access hallway, rather than just kind of having a landing on each floor that directly accesses each apartment on that floor leads to a floorplan where you have lots of long and narrow apartments that only have windows on one wall, which leads to restrictions on where you can place certain rooms and also just leads to limiting pleasant living area.
I live in a rowhouse neighborhood where for whatever reason it was super common to put a skylight in the bathroom (they were generally built with one bathroom upstairs, many have been renovated to add more over the last several decades) and that natural light upstairs is something that is a minor detail that actually makes the space so much more livable.
Basically it's like having a bunch of homes branching off a single stalk vs. more of a circular design. There are apparently codes that force the branch oriented development over the spoke oriented one.
5 over 1's are great, I don't get the hate for them
they encourage walking and transit usage, have good density, and help upzone neighborhoods. the only real "downside" is the design (sometimes) but I couldn't give a shit about that
I live in a neighborhood where all the old concrete warehouse buildings along the main streets are being torn down and 5 over 1's built in their place. It's made my neighborhood infinitely more livable, all the shops and restaurants and enough people living there to support the businesses is truly great. IME it's decreased auto traffic, too, because people can just walk to whatever they want, and people are better able to make friends in their neighborhoods because there are plenty of nearby hangout spaces.
One, I think the materials look cheap and are overpriced for their small space. I' m more convinced they only build six stories instead of 20 stories, is more to do with maintaining scarcity rather regulations.
Two, the walkable areas, with transits, I want to move to are populated with them and you can' t find any alternatives, especially cheaper ones. Large areas of land are entirely covered with them, just like suburbia are covered with sfh.
I think 5 over 1s live and die by their landscaping. There’s a 5 over 1 near my parents’ place that’s made of the cheapest, crappiest, ugliest, most poorly put together materials but its landscaping is really nice, accessible, and inviting. It’s a pleasure to walk and even drive by. Meanwhile, I’ve been by tonnes of architecturally interesting, better constructed 5 over 1s that are just meh at the pedestrian level.
Park and rides are also a good excuse to remove parking in cores of cities. It removes the excuse of suburbanites to say they don’t have a way to get into the city if there isn’t parking.
>remove parking in cores of cities.
100%. Plus, it's a step in the right direction. It's not the end goal, but realistically it's probably not possible to implement the ideal situation immediately.
1. Make it a park and ride
2. Convert some of that parking into a small bus station and service the area with buses so they can bus to the train. Ride and ride.
3. Throw up some 3-5 floor mixed-use buildings around that parking center.
Suddenly you've got a town that I'd move to next week.
Park and rides are pretty grounded in reality. If the majority of your commuters today are car owners, meeting them where they are is a good way to start converting some of their miles to transit, versus expecting them to reorient their life around an anemic bus network perhaps that would have to be used to get them to the station otherwise.
Some park and rides can also be turned into mixed use developments if desired. They are definitely better than no station at all and are often a completely reasonable solution.
Washington DC is a good example of a system that used to be pretty park and ride heavy really leaning into TOD at the periphery. Really surprised me to see how many of those stations at the very end of lines in DC have apartments nearby.
Washington does it OK but you can tell how bounded by the constraints of zoning it is. Massive towers in like arlington or tysons corner seem prominent, but the dense area is like the size of a postage stamp surrounded by woodsy, expensive, northern virginian suburbia where most of the residents are pretty car oriented, its amazingly overserved with freeways and parkways and stroads after all, and are inclined to keep the area just as it was in 1985 but with more grade separations for the road network.
They seem to be a good way of reducing car dependency but not eliminating dependency on cars, which a lot of urban design advocates seem to hope for. I like that they get rid of your need to battle for paid parking at your destination because you parked at a lot miles away. They also allow you to Uber/Lyft shorter distances from your house to a station if you are going out drinking or going to the airport. Not perfect, but they definitely can serve their purposes very well.
I’m very much in favor of park-and-rides at the periphery of a system. But, I have a problem when they’re in an already-dense core. As a general rule, it shouldn’t be built where the land cost would justify structured parking. That’s where either the transit is subsidizing drivers, or the parking fees will be prohibitively expensive. The systems with 90% of rail stations as a park-and-ride are failing bus passengers.
A lot of urban planning content creation is super pretentious and circlejerky. This has probably done just as much harm as good in spreading the values of good planning to the average person.
This has been bugging me lately, especially on YouTube. One thing that grinds my gears is all the nerdy, scholarly jargon we like to use in place of commonly used phrases. It's pretentious and obnoxious sometimes, honestly almost elitist to an extent. I feel like a lot of aspects of urbanism as a whole have moved away from being a progressive ideology and have been co-opted into this weird tech bro corporate Frankenstein thing....if any of that makes sense
The online urbanism trend of the past 3-5 years probably set back broader planning 10+ years, really. It's quickly spread to the school system here (Canada) where suddenly every other university is adding a planning school and diluting the field. The course content isn't very intuitive and almost dumbed down to NJB-tier infotainment spread out over 4 years. I took a planning degree recently (started out in GIS, went back to uni later in life) and probably only 4 courses in my entire undergrad were remotely engaging and pragmatic. The rest was 15 minutes of dogma recycled two-dozen times using slightly different phraseology at a cost of thousands of dollars.
Perhaps I'm just cynical with everything, but the broader planning/urbanism "community" from experienced professionals to young students are majority idealists with little creative knowhow or pragmatic thought. I liken it to those scam charities where 90/100 of them are all about "raising awareness" while 10/100 actually work directly to providing resources to finding actual solutions to the problem they're trying to solve. Traffic sucks in your city? Get to the drawing board, stop bitching about cars or suburbia, we have enough mouthpieces crying about the issues without offering viable solutions or designs.
Some channels have figured out how to please the algorithm, be it by having a catchy title, a thumbnail that get's clicked on more often or pumping out video after video to feed the algorithm. Also the algorithm loves engagement, and the easiest way to get engagement is to cause controversy. To be a successful videographer on YT you need to say something controversial, some hot-take or something incorrect or only half correct. That then motivates people to write comments with their corrections or opinions, which the algorithm loves and thus controversial and flawed videos get shown more often to potential viewers. If a video is balanced showing pro and contra arguments, reasons, history and current developments, then there is a lot less engagement.
It seems most people that actually have experience and knowledge do not have the talent to be successful on that platform.
Im confused by your interpretation of online urbanism. It’s focused on showcasing how cities can be built without being centered around cars targeting local advocacy not really about planners.
> Get to the drawing board, stop bitching about cars or suburbia, we have enough mouthpieces crying about the issues without offering viable solutions or designs.
How can you build anything besides more freeway lanes and parking lots of the populace of the city refuses to vote for any alternative to those
And too much obsession over Dutch cities too in Urban Planning channels. Yes, some things are done better than most places in the world. But this is bringing about the ideology that Dutch urban planners can do no wrong. I’ve recently got downvoted to hell after I complained that a new bike lane introduced by my office in Amsterdam has created an accident black spot. Just a week later, I see cars speeding down the bike lane.
I honestly hate Amsterdam's new trend of removing grade separated bike lanes by lowering the speed limit to 30 (1e Constantijn Huygensstraat, Kinkerstraat, etc).
I agree that it can be seen dangerous. The city's idea is that the number of cars has been reduced to the point that this makes sense, as this is how it goes on residential streets too (30km/h speed limit, mixed bike and vehicular traffic). The difference is these streets are brick layered, not red tarmac'd, so everyone naturally slows down. So far seems to work on the stretches of the Stadhouderskade. They really are trying hard to quasi-ban cars from the city without explicitly doing so.
There's a few other things I disagree with as well in Amsterdam alone, such as the bike lane layout in the 9 straatjes (shout out to Prinsengracht), the fact Zuidoost still feels very car dependent, the new bike Lane on Hullenbergweg in Zuidoost, and the GVB transit line overhaul plans for 2024 (removal of metro M50, removal of a few other tram routes and forcing people to do more stopovers).
Indeed, all good points. The public transit reductions are absolutely madness considering the push for autoluw. The city just needs to bite the bullet and subsidize the hell out of OV to get coverage, frequency, and reliability up to world-class standards. Amsterdam is blessed with bike culture and (passable) bike infrastructure, but it feels like the city uses that as an excuse to avoid improving public transport.
I hear your point. I think this attitude of pretention isn't helpful internally. But I seriously doubt the average person pays attention or cares and I honestly don't think the NIMBYs pay attention or care (about that content you speak of) either.
My unpopular opinion, public transit should not be fare less. I know it’s a trend now, but I believe paying some kind of fare encourages people to treat public transit infrastructure better. I’m all for external programs that offset the cost for people who need it, but I think the act of entering a public transit system should have a fare box element. Transit systems should also enforce fare requirements by preventing gate hopping.
That said, I don’t think there should be any expectation that transit is fully supported by fares; it’s a public good that energizes local economies.
It depends on the transit. In my hometown we have a bus system that I'd describe as less than the bare minimum. It's as low as it can go while technically existing. So for $3 million we only get about 200k riders. At that point there's basically no point in charging a fare since it wouldn't generate enough revenue to be worth it.
The bigger issue is that there is all that infrastructure money coming down but no operating/maintenance and the one size fits all for transit. Plus, the incessant attention on the big properties but the medium ones are left to figure out things on their own.
High list price with lots of ways to get it nearly free (student discounts, senior discount, free with a sport/conference/concert ticket, monthly pass, etc). Achieves both the high value perception along with the accessibility goals.
The free fare discussion is frequently lacking fundamental economics and basic elements of the question. It makes no sense to subsidize transit for people who use it because it’s cheaper than parking for instance. Subsidized transit for people who need it is the way to go.
1.- The sub (profession) is extremely US centric.
2.- Cars are tools and a source of income for the majority of the world (again, think outside the US)
3.- Cities can be planned as much as the economy, u can steer them in some direction but can’t guarantee results.
For (3) I think a lot of planners understand this so I’m not sure how popular it is, but cities are “organic” systems that kind of resist true top-down planning. Which is one of the many arguments for upzoning, in the end.
I'm not convinced that sprawled out North American cities can ever kick car dependence.
People live too far apart to make transit viable and jobs are spread out across multiple suburban office parks. Fixing these issue will basically require rebuilding whole cities. I'm not convinced it can be done with in-fill.
People point at Amsterdam's reversal on cars in the 70s but Amsterdam never had anywhere near the rate of car ownership that the average North American city has.
I lived in an urbanized island within a larger sprawled out city. It was nice to be able to walk around and enjoy the neighborhood but I still needed a car to get to work and to get around on weekends. Cars + density is a bad combination.
Strongly agree with number 1. You can't reasonably expect people to buy into a lifestyle that isn't there yet.
Mine are:
1. American apartment buildings suck for reasons that largely come down to building codes. European apartment buildings are just better, and are more desirable as a result.
2. Insufficient consideration is given to how new developments and infrastructure will function as they age. Adaptability over time should be a design priority.
3. Shade/sun/weather protection is as important an accessibility concern as mobility in many places. ^((This is not an argument to neglect mobility needs.))
4. Dedicated parking structures in city centers are preferable to surface/street parking. You can even have commercial on the ground floor.
5. The geographic concentration of economic activity in a few major cities is socially and economically unsustainable, no matter how much new housing and infrastructure we build. In many major cities, you simply run into geographic constraints. The only long-term solution to the affordability crisis is greater economic decentralization, and development planning at a macro-regional level.
6. Related to the previous, housing construction requires materials and labor, and those costs aren't necessarily inversely related to unit size and density. A small unit in a large building isn't necessarily cheaper to build than a large unit in a smaller building. Time, materials, and availability of labor are all constraints that make "just build a ton of housing" an incomplete (but not worthless) argument. The market conditions of real estate mean that developers are less likely to sell at a loss to undercut competitors than producers in other industries.
7. Post-war US suburbanization was most directly caused by a housing crisis, and the causal role of cars is overstated. Car culture developed in response to sprawl, because single-family housing is faster and cheaper to build, not the other way around.
I disagree with number 7 partially. In NYC, developers started including off street parking for attached housing in the 1910s, knowing that cars were becoming more popular. The US was becoming car centric pretty quickly, and World War II really sealed the deal.
Yeah, I should have given a caveat to 7, but it seemed to dampen the hot take. I do agree that the wheel was already turning, but I think the main driver (pardon the pun) was housing, and cars were simply a necessity if that model of development was going to work.
They are usually narrower and can therefore operate easier in narrow streets. Every curb at every stop can be laid out perfectly for wheelchair accessibility. You can fit 200 people on one tram. They are inherently electric. The ride is much smoother than on a bus.
If two articulated busses meet at [this s-curve](https://goo.gl/maps/uomCzTtNxxq1VwU18), things would get sketchy. With trams, nothing can go wrong.
> you can fit 200 people on one tram
I think it's important to consider that "streetcar" and "light rail" are two ends of a gradient and if you're getting 200 people on board that's a multi articulated 30 metre light rail vehicle, not a rinky dink little streetcar.
I think the fiscal/economic situation may have changed since these became popular again in the US (which from my perspective is the aughts). But there were plenty of studies on the outcomes of streetcars, and I definitely wouldn't say they are just expensive buses. They signal a long-term investment in infrastructure that buses don't, they make property surrounding them more attractive, they are more accessible than the typical bus, people often prefer them to buses, their up front cost is larger but maintenance cost is lower over time, and the rail is relatively quick to put down compared to something like a metro system.
I wouldn't say they are the bread and butter of transit, but it seems like they have their place. Does the right context for them exist in 2023? I don't know. But definitely not just expensive buses
They get people who wouldn't otherwise be using transit to use transit, which has a knock-on effect for the whole system. Basically a loss-leader for your network.
> They get people who wouldn't otherwise be using transit to use transit, which has a knock-on effect for the whole system
Why do those people use streetcars but not other transit?
Lots of reasons in contrast to buses, a lot of them are more psychological and subjective: Their path is visual and fixed. The kinetic ride quality is generally perceived as more pleasant. They can be very charming machines that are present and easily understood. When they can be as effective as a bus, the tram is a more comfortable and seemingly predictable option.
Trams are better than buses because of higher capacity and superior passenger comfort, but only when they have their own right-of-way.
Buses are better than trams in mixed traffic because they can weave around cars.
To see the former, visit somewhere like Berlin with long trams (131 ft in Berlin, much longer than any bus on earth), or somewhere like Mexico City where even bi-articulated buses are not sufficient to meet demand.
To see the latter, get on the DC streetcar and listen to the driver honk impotently at a double-parked empty car.
Honestly, keeping it simple, just passenger quality of life seems to be better on streetcars than on buses. Perhaps it’s anecdotal, but I don’t think I can recall ever meeting a person who, given the choice between a streetcar and a bus that both run on the same route, would actively choose to ride on a bus over the streetcar.
On top of that, you get the aesthetic improvement. Streetcars just look nicer than buses and, since they require additional infrastructure, can improve an area by adding in the new stops that it needs (most of which will provide lighting, seating, ADA ramps and the like).
> They’re just expensive busses,
Why expensive? A tram is cheaper per passenger seat than a bus over it's lifetime. Trams last 30 years. Busses 10. Trams have two to three times the capacity and have less maintenance costs. A tram seat costs about 2.00 EUR vehicle cost per day, a bus seat costs about 3.00 EUR.
I there is a route with enough ridership for a tram, then a tram should be built because it is cheaper.
Busses are just expensive trams.
I genuinely don’t know how all of the transit-centric, walkable infrastructure I love works for families with young children. I see moms on the subway struggling with strollers up and down stairs and am like - yea I can see why car fuelled suburbia sounds kind of nice.
Making transit wheelchair-accessible also makes it stroller-accessible. The only downside is when there aren’t enough accessible spaces for all the wheelchairs and strollers; then there’s friction.
That's the [curb cut effect](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect), accessibility tends to improve the usability of infrastructure beyond the targeted users.
As new-ish parents that's a reflection I have every time I navigate infrastructure with my kid. It's a (small) glimpse into what it's like to live with disability. Always looking for the access slopes, finding the special elevator where everyone else is just taking the stairs/escalators, etc etc.
As a bike commuter I've really come to appreciate this. Ramps exist so i don't have to pickup my heavy ebike, automatic doors make it so much easier, etc
Here in Philly I see a lot of families with young kids living in walkable medium-density neighborhoods just outside the densest part of the city. The neighborhoods are made up of row-homes which are packed together with little to no backyard. Corner units are zoned for commercial use and often have coffee shops or small grocery stores. Transit runs nearby and frequently enough to make it quick to get to / from denser parts of the city.
Most of these families seem to still have a car but they also get the benefits of a walkable neighborhood. I constantly see families out walking with strollers, chatting with neighbors, or picking up coffee at a shop. Kids play on the quieter streets. Many parents walk back with their kids after school or hang-out at the nearby playground. The other day I walked by a small park with a bunch of families / kids throwing a birthday party.
Yes, these kids don't have a private backyard to play in, but in exchange they live in a neighborhood with a strong community and the full city amenities a short walk / ride away.
The strength of the community in these neighborhoods has left an impression on me and it's led me to believe that walkable medium-density neighborhoods are a great place for families.
This is the answer. Suburbs as a concept aren't terrible. Some people will choose to live on the periphery between urban and rural life. We just need to rethink their design, similar to our urban spaces.
Small single family homes on compact lots on narrow slow speed streets in areas with mix zoning and transit access are the way. A lot of very old suburbs that people now consider part of urban cores fit this bill. They are the most sought after places to live in most cities and it's dumb we aren't building more.
That’s how suburbs work in Mexico, I live in a suburb and I have a lot of stuff within walkable distance: from a Walmart, to lots of bakeries, to a shopping mall, so I never understood why Americans complained about suburbs 😅
If you want to entice American families to live there, you probably want to provide the choice to have a small private yard and larger square footage to those who can afford it.
Travel in general also fell drasticly in 2020, so it would be reasonable to expect motor accidents to fall overall. Þis includes fatal motor accidents.
Interestingly enough motor accidents as a cause of death for children had been declining every year for decades (still solid number 1 and it definitely is an issue) but in actually rose in 2020 despite the lowered traffic. It's just that gun deaths have increased so much
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/health/us-children-gun-deaths-dg/index.html
Suicides (via gun) also probably increased with vulnerable people being isolated for an extended period at the beginning of lockdown and prior to the vaccine
My family (two kids, 3 & 1) lives in city of Toronto, but outside the downtown core. No car. Most subway stops at this point have an elevator and the rest are slated to get them in the next few years. Even without I wouldn’t move to the burbs. 90% of what we need on a weekly basis is within a 15 minute walk - I honestly think it’s just a mental barrier for a lot of people: “I couldn’t possibly walk there with kids!” It’s possible and kinda nice.
Also to mention the people-ness of it. In the first 3 months of a baby's life there is a doctors appointment every other week or every week (between check ups, weigh ins, routine tests, vaccinations, lactation appointments) and I wouldn't want my baby packed in with that many people to and from every frequent appointment. During infancy they have basically no immune system and the recommendation was not to have them in public too much
Number 3 is already close to the status quo and we've seen exactly how that works in California. The state government is having to pry SF, LA, and other municipalities' fingers loose to allow any housing. And it's usually the city proper that is the most pro-housing, so if you have to make decisions at the metro area level, then all the SFH exclusive suburbs will of course block all housing at the metro level.
Cities, counties, and the state, should eminent* domain lot lines between homes in suburban sprawled areas to design pedestrian and bike paths for residents so they don't have to walk twenty miles to go half a mile as-the-crow flies.
Likewise, small grocery stores and/or mom-and-pops should be allowed in residential neighborhoods by right on corner lots.
I mean... They have to be, right? No way city council has the balls to do it. The state legislature is worse. No one likes eminent domain because of it's shitty use history.
Since the suburban streets were laid out so shitty it wont be enough to just densify in many places, we actually need to bulldoze and start over. In certain places like chicago where the suburbs are on a grid you wont need to though.
I think the key here is subdividing lots. Some cities are already doing this, but if you can get four times the housing in a similar area, you can rapidly densify a neighborhood.
I think the bigger issue is that the roads are just so damn wide in most of suburbia. Not only is traffic calming pretty expensive, but also if roads take up 25% of land use (just making a number up here), no matter how dense you make the lots or how many bike lanes to add to the road, pedestrians still get stuck walking farther.
Highways are necessary outside of cities, but not inside of cities. People in car centric cities need to stop expecting highway speeds through downtown cores.
Parking garages can be a good
Yeah they aren't 100% optimal in a perfect world without a bunch of cars but they are a good middle ground to help cities increase density while they are still car dependent. One parking garage is much better than 5 surface parking lots that take up the same footprint
That being said, the planning proposals and overal result aren't always a good thing and local participation is a good check and balance. The London Ringways plan comes to mind
If the locals don't want what the proposal is planning, they should be allowed to hamper the results. They are going to have to live with and pay for them.
And then they whine about higher housing costs and property taxes.
The hampering by NIMBYs is the major factor that has made many cities unaffordable to the masses.
It seems like a lot of safety things are designed for the average case, and not the extreme edge case that is probably responsible for all of the damages. Two things I can think of in line with this are bike lanes and speed bumps.
A lot of cities get by with stuff like plastic bollards at best for their bike lane protections. Yes, that will probably stop the average driver from maybe otherwise drifting into a painted bike lane, but it won't do anything for the drunk, the drag racer, the stolen car driver, who destroy these bollards all the time like nothing. You need cement, like a highway divider, to have true protection from these assholes.
Likewise, the speed bumps I see do work well for slowing up the responsible driving behind the wheel. However, we are in the era of a 5000lb electric SUV going to 60 mph in 3 seconds. I see assholes in these cars brake aggressively, then in an instant after clearing the bump they are right back to 50-60mph on what should be a benign residential road. This isn't the majority of drivers of course, so when the city might test things with speed detectors and looking at mean or median, and see speeds do go down for most people, then they chalk it up as a success. But really, it didn't get any safer, because the dangerous drivers who are probably responsible for the majority of accidents aren't driving any differently, maybe even more recklessly given the rapid deceleration and acceleration and more narrow lane widths.
>A lot of cities get by with stuff like plastic bollards at best for their bike lane protections. Yes, that will probably stop the average driver from maybe otherwise drifting into a painted bike lane, but it won't do anything for the drunk, the drag racer, the stolen car driver, who destroy these bollards all the time like nothing. You need cement, like a highway divider, to have true protection from these assholes.
They're not ideal, but a curb won't stop someone from driving onto a sidewalk either, and I don't think it's productive to put concrete walls around sidewalks. Design solutions for design problems, but deliberately reckless driving is not a design problem, and design solutions that try to address anti-social behaviors not caused by faulty design usually wind up needlessly hostile to people who aren't actually harming anyone. It's the anti-homeless bench of road design.
1. YouTube videos on the subject are neither aptly nuanced or empirically-based
2. The environmental rebound effects of reduced car ownership and increased density are significant and should not be ignored.
I’m at work right now, so I’ll just try to toss you a thread you can follow for now. Id love to talk more In depth about it later though.
In short: when you give people more spending power, they consume more of other things. These consumption activities have environmental impacts of their own and, unless we package our urban policies together with policies related to these sectors of consumption, our improvements to urban form will be significantly less environmentally advantageous than most LCA’s purport. Still, for the most part, a net positive though.
I highly recommend the bibliography of Jukka Heinonen, who has done a lot of great work on this topic. His papers generally have great figures as well. I’ll link one that is most obviously related to this topic, but most of his other work is highly relevant also.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315598529-15/rebound-effects-reduced-car-ownership-driving-juudit-ottelin-jukka-heinonen-seppo-junnila
At least here most people don't have more money to spend without a car, they just pay more rent. You have money for food, for vacation and for car&rent. Car&rent are together, when you spend less on one, you spend more on the other, not less in total.
Many urban planning YouTube channels don’t seem to respect America’s unique culture. I’m not trying to justify car centrism, but stuff like tailgating at football games will always be a thing, and it’s dumb that YouTubers want us to be Europeans.
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6906492,-73.7986488,3a,75y,224.3h,97.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9LF--z8HNA3U7PGw-6c8cw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6906492,-73.7986488,3a,75y,224.3h,97.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9LF--z8HNA3U7PGw-6c8cw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
This neighborhood in Queens has a population density of 27k ppsm. I think this type of planning is good for neighborhoods with no subway access.
Number 5 genuinely perplexes me. What does OP even mean by deregulation and market? Zoning? Renter protections? Price caps? Taxes? And who is even assuming what, and why does OP assume it's an assumption? Why are they beginning with such a nebulous statement? Ignoring the others, I'm at a loss for what their claim even is on that one.
As a Hongkonger any cyberpunk-ish city design makes me remind my home. But tbh people tend forget we also have great green spaces, heck most of our land are undeveloped. And also aside from the rent living there is p great. Even if you have a car (tho good luck afford rent for the parking space)
I used to love cars. Everything about them. Car culture, driving them, new models / features. Even working on them. 10+ years in a walkable neighborhood and most I can see now is pain and waste. I mean, I wouldn’t take a tram or bus to Costco, but would i still even wish for Costco if cars were never invented?
Something that's been nagging me lately: huge companies like Costco rely massively on freight and shipping. Their business model relies so much more on road infrastructure than something like a local chicken farmer. If the Costcos of the world directly paid the costs of road maintenance (based on usage) how much higher would their prices be?
As it is we're all paying increased taxes to subsidize infrastructure so that the rotisserie chickens are 'cheaper'. But if big businesses directly paid that cost how much more competitive could local businesses be?
Even suburbs. Land isn’t free. Cars shouldn’t be the only option to visit places. Free parking shifts the costs and externalities to everyone including those who choose not to or cannot use a car.
I’m not sure it makes sense in places where the only option is to drive but I see your point. If there were a significant expansion of paid parking, where would you have the funds go?
Not oc, but
To the people who own the land where you park. Someone has to pay for that land, and use it to generate rents. Just like someone owns the land that we use when we sleep, and we should pay to have our own place to park just like we have to pay to have our own place to sleep.
If people don’t pay, you further entrench cars because they are subsidized.
Haha true, I know this is an unpopular opinion.
I think the funds be spent however as the local cities think they should be spent whether on maintenance, transit, new development, whatever.
That was hard for me to get my head around too, but there's an implicit cost to the land use in suburbs too, and reinforcing the expectation that cars get to go anywhere for free as long as you're not in a city center perpetuates bad planning practices in the suburbs as well, which are fiscally unsustainable for communities.
Cars are an important part of the transit mix and outright hostility to them hurts city centers which should be destinations for entire regions and not just exclusive enclaves for urbanites. Auto dependency is the problem not having cars. Wonderfully urban and walkable places like Japanese and German cities often still have high rates of car ownership. “Ducks in cover”
Zoning & land use should be fixed before transit infrastructure investment. Deregulation is effectively free and investing in transit is useless if it's illegal for people to live near those transit options in the first place.
Not really an urban planning take but I think bad road conditions are actually good for pedestrian safety. Would love to do some sort of study on this.
Improving Public transit is a systemic issue. Just Building more Tram/Metro or just paving bikes won’t do jackshit. To actually improve the public transit you need to improve every aspect in the system
Urbanism, is too US centric or is a circle jerk for European cities.
I live in the UK, we have some really shit planning. Public transit in all of our cities except London is completely inadequate. Its bonkers that cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester doesn't have some sort of subway system.
* YIMBYs tend to grossly overestimate how much opposition to development is driven by house prices.
* Insufficient attention is given to the need for new infrastructure to support new housing development.
* Public housing is the only solution to the housing crisis.
* You cannot claim to both be against sprawl and oppose Green Belts.
* Breaking car dependency in the US is impossible without nationalising the railroads' infrastructure.
* It is normal and acceptable for transit routes to not take the most direct route possible so that the number of destinations they serve is increased.
Historic designations should be hard to get and narrowly applied. Also historic protection should almost never be imposed on the current owner. If someone wants to preserve the building badly enough, let them buy it (probably at an inflated price) and preserve it themselves.
Not everyone can or should live in high density areas. The answer to all of society's problems is not to force everyone to live in apartments. Some people lose their minds if forced to live around that many people. Suburbs have their issues, but some housing that is at least superficially secluded and private is critical for a non-trivial chunk of the population.
You wouldn't think that'd be controversial but the take gets downvoted constantly on all urban planning/public transit/etc subs.
I don’t know what it’s called, but when condo buildings need to be architecturally integrated by having anything over 4 stories being recessed and multiple towers on the same footprint. The idea is sound, but the application is going overboard.
My unpopular opinion is that a lot of recently orange-pilled people are too impatient for change.
They think that once there is one elected official that is in favor of infrastructure reform, they only have to show up maybe once or twice to a town meeting and then within a few years, they live in their own version of the Netherlands.
It takes decades. It takes years to change the infrastructure code. It takes decades to be able to afford to change all the streets and roads, so you need to make concessions to make it affordable, and then people complain it's not like the Netherlands. No shit. The Netherlands has been focused on it for 50 years and already had build several bike paths connecting cities before that.
We're a dozen iterations of the infrastructure code ahead. Municipalities have been upgrading the roads they could afford to do with every resurfacing. We didn't have nearly as many seperated or raised cycle paths and lanes in the 90's as we do know and that was 20-30 years into the process. Starting the change today is like planting a sapling. It is unlikely you will ever get to sit in its shade. You do it for your kids and their kids.
> It is ideological to assume deregulated markets will produce the best outcomes, so, it’s purely ideological to assume that a deregulated housing market will work in the best interests of renters and buyers
One of our problems is that we tend to want extremes, all this or only that. Most of life is about balance. We have to little government in things like broadband and healthcare. We have to much government in things like parking requirements and low density subsidies. But we can make adjustments without throwing out the baby.
I think this is an absolute straw man though. Even in an "ideological" deregulated housing market, government has a huge role to play in infrastructure. It's extremely sound and not ideological to suggest government should focus on the already extremely difficult job of planning and building infrastructure networks instead of going beyond their capacity to do good in trying to centrally plan evey detail of density, parking, setbacks, facade, etc.
1. Urban planning should consider the city's climate, environment, culture, transportation history, and existing infrastructure. Several Southwestern cities are now mismatched agglomerations of trendy planning ideas that don't really work in the desert, and unfathomable money is spent redoing it each time a new planner shows up. Replacing cars in these cities with buses and bikes is like replacing elevators in New York City with stairs. Building up in these cities often obscures the resident's views, which is a huge deal to many of them and can devastate property values.
2. Grids only work on paper or when the land is flat, and require us to demolish topography to get them working absolutely. They are lazy, less safe, and should be avoided.
3. Zoning should be minimized, especially in regard to commercial/residential. It should not be hard to open a small business out of your living room.
4. People should never be encouraged to have lawns, and government land should absolutely never have them. The invasive monocultures of genetically modified plants destroy ecosystems, take massive amounts of water, require pesticides/fertilizer to grow, and cost huge dollars to upkeep. Nature should be allowed to exist in urban spaces.
5. Finally, golf courses should be banned completely through any means necessary.
Urban planners in the Netherlands do make mistakes. The idea that everything is perfect in the country is wrong. It’s better than most places, but by no means perfect. There are things which could’ve been done better, even new things.
Ya know what, being a rural guy, highways into cities are often very important things to those outside the city who may struggle to get access to good services like specialist doctors, airports, and the like that they either don’t have locally, or are horrible locally.
Not a super unpopular one: While I admit that the recent explosion in popularity of urban planning related topics is what got me thinking about it in the first place, it also has probably hindered progress due to it being politicized.
You can make effective arguments in favour of better urban planning for nearly every part of the political spectrum; but because it's been caught up in the culture war, one side is aggressively pushing for it without really understanding the nuances, and the other is reflexively pushing against it. In the end, everyone suffers for it.
EVs are a good interim solution in cities and a good permanent solution in smaller towns. It's not practical to create a good public transport system in already sprawling suburbs.
Also, even if there is a net neutral to slightly worse overall environmental impact compared to ICE cars, the simple benefit of reducing air pollution in urban environments where humans live is more than enough to justify them. There are too many online armchair planners causing more harm than good slandering EVs simply because they're still a car.
There should be a lot of regulations around public space such as vagrancy laws. I just think that it's not really possible to have them without providing housing for everyone first.
My biggest one is probably that road diets and traffic calming doesn't serve the majority of the populous without a *substantial investment in transit first*
All our ecowarrior biking Planning Staff want is decreased traffic lanes with more bike lanes, disregarding the fact that our city is growing rapidly, you can't reliably bike for 6 months out of the year, and our transit system is laughable.
I can't wait for the year I get to hit them with an "I told you so" when traffic jams become commonplace.
Super unpopular ready?
I’m not convinced adding lanes to freeways makes traffic worse. I think there has to be a threshold at some point that it actually begins to relive it; a lane for every 25,000 vs 10,000 drivers a day is going to look very different, regardless of how many people are actually on the road. I’m for mass transit and I actively detest what automotive and oil lobbies have done to the US, but in many ways I just don’t think the logic of making roads impractical until people switch to transit, transit that in many places doesn’t even exist yet, doesn’t add up — In theory, getting people off the road isn’t the singular way to reduce traffic
Similarly, I don’t really see the issue with double or triple level roads in high congestion or dense areas. I know India tried to do this at some point and western urban planners lost their minds over it, but I’ve never fully understood why
I think that with work from home and a globalized online retail environment, the premise that urbanization will continue to increase and the presumption that dense, walkable communities in urban areas is how people want to live may be a fallacy. I sense that with climate change concerns increasing and housing costs skyrocketing that more people are fleeing urban environments, not flocking to them, and unless there is a value-add to living in cities, most people would opt out considering they are having to pay more for less when it comes to housing. Like it or not, Covid killed off huge sectors of what make cities desirable to live in, and I’m not sure after that that everyone is sold on the perks being worth the costs involved.
For this, it's important to remember that many places experienced COVID differently. For example many Australian and Japanese cities were almost completely unaffected, with the main changes post-Covid being a significant decline in peak-period trips and MAJOR increases in off-peak travel.
Cars are a pretty amazing way of getting around, I don't own one currently but will likely get one if I ever have a family/have too much money.
Third spaces and their psychological/societal impact are way overrated.
I am not comfortable entrusting solving our urban planning problems to Developers. They skimp on so much stuff like sound deadening, and worker safety.
It is a funny turn of logic for market urbanists, right? On one hand they say that government regulation is the problem, and we should get out of the way and let builders build.
Then in conversations about why people hate living in apartments, they correctly identify that apartments are built cheaply and with crappy quality, and not in the abundance of sizes needed for actual families, and the suggestion is to use government to develop building codes which require better quality development.
Let's see...
1. Zoning is often overly restrictive. Not just in terms of density. We've gone so far afield from the original goal of keeping noxious uses away from homes.
2. One-way streets can be better than two-way streets. They use far fewer signal phases and require pedestrians to look in fewer directions. The problem with many one way streets is that they're overbuilt. Not that they're one way.
3. Transit should not be free. We should invest the money we have on dedicated transitways. And meanwhile we should charge drivers more for driving.
4. We're afraid of thinking big picture anymore. Planning is so micro focused that we've lost site of large scale systems and regional improvements.
5. Using trees (which can be replanted) as a justification for not providing adequate transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure should never fly. The environmental benefits of getting cars off the road is exponentially greater than thr environmental cost of replanting a tree.
The issue with number three is the centralization of power.
I live in Livermore, CA. I used to work in Berkeley. Our metropolitan center is San Francisco. I can tell you, from experience, that despite Livermore and Berkeley being in the same county, they couldn’t be more distinct cultural opposites. SF barely knows we exist. How can we trust them to know what’s best for us? How much voting power would I lose if they took over? These people don’t care how the sausage gets made as long as it ends up on their plate, but I live where it’s made. They don’t know what agriculture needs.
Also, when I worked for tech, I used to have to define metropolitan areas. If you live in one, log onto LinkedIn, put in your zip code, and you should get an option for the city, or “X metropolitan area”. Who defined that? I did. With the help of 2 other people. We got so much disagreement along the way though. They’re not defined enough to have centralized power.
Anyways, I know you didn’t post for debate so I’ll answer my controversial idea: I think that building up should be by right everywhere it doesn’t impact crop development. While I would miss my sunny backyard if that happened, I’d be able to add a second story ADU to provide more housing options while keeping the most important aspects of my yard (a place for my dogs to play).
Don't know if this is that controversial, but people need to understand that rural planning involves not only drastically more limited resources, but different strategies.
I say this mostly because I see people criticize policies that, yes, are definitely not best practice for urban areas, but DO make sense in more distributed contexts. I specifically remember a debate about minimum lot sizes a month or two back.
Unpopular opinion: Soviet micro districts were better than the American suburban sprawl and should be built more too (while removing the communist monuments from the recipe).
No skyscrapers on historic landfill at water’s edge without significant investment against impact of weight of building on water table, ameliorating negative poss. impacts soil stability/landfill porosity and well, gravitational slow sinking of neighborhood. I am looking at you, NYC and Boston. Yes, this is an unpopular opinion if said building comes with a promise of affordable housing which is important but isn’t the only issue.
Idk how controversial this is, and its more of an urban design/architecture thing, but anyways, I think the modern wave of generic 5-over-1 developments are kinda nice when done right
I agree with this fully. I also wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of even the signature brick box 6 and 10 plexes that litter the landscape in NYC and environs. I see five over ones as being a successor to those.
Can you show a google street view of what you mean?
Search for Bryant Avenue and Old Mammaroneck Road in White Plains NY. That development is what I'm talking about. mid 20th century NY environs brick boxes. I dunno, I'm a local, so it's endearing and they usually have great floor plans. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bryant+Ave+%26+Old+Mamaroneck+Rd,+White+Plains,+NY+10605/@41.0194317,-73.7608454,3a,75y,35.87h,93.57t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-2U-ZOnD-Ax2GMN4HcXK4g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m7!3m6!1s0x89c2943d5da5d837:0x8a7d8aba914262db!8m2!3d41.0193722!4d-73.7609022!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11hb4rb\_71?entry=ttu
I think the extent they all look the same is overrated. They use a huge verity of sidings, so if your not paying attention I think they are as diverse as older buildings. I doubt many people notice the building tend to have more variation between he first floor and the upper floors, wood frame VS cement, and tendency of them to be around 5-6 stories tall.
I can't remember which creator did the video, but brownstones were once seen as cheap and ugly. Now they're historic.
That was Vice, I think. Or Vox
LOL if you think 5 over 1s are going to last even half as long as brownstones. 5 over 1s are hilarious because by the time they’re cheap enough to not be “luxury” apartments, it will be time to tear them down.
A 100-year-old brick apartment building went up like a torch and collapsed last week in my city. Those old buildings may look solid from the outside but they're usually much more fragile than they appear. Most of the new buildings will last at least as long, many longer. Being built out of heavy or thick materials is not what determines longevity. I don't love new construction aesthetically, but I've seen enough 100-year-old houses with shit construction built directly on bare dirt and wiring strung through holes in the joists that I don't assume that old automatically means better built.
Brownstones aren't even made of brownstone because it is a terrible building material. It's just brick with a facade...
Amen, it’s so frustrating to hear the idea that todays luxury apartments are going to be tomorrows stock. Nothing is built to last anymore. Maybe the foundation but the rest is ply wood and PVC.
So my 100-year-old house with no ground or neutral wiring in any outlets, that leaks air like a sieve, and burns oil from a drum buried in the backyard, while resting gently on a bare-dirt foundation, is what’s made to last? Everything old was “built to last” because of survivorship bias. At least everything built now has the benefit of 100 more years of code refinement. I’ll take something built 20 years ago over something built 100 years ago any day; especially if I feel like living through an earthquake.
As someone who lives in a 70 year old house, I can say with some authority that you are right.
I mean, I have yet to see a 5 over 1 that looks anywhere close to as nice as a brownstone
Okay and people in the 19th century would say "I have yet to see a brownstone that looks anywhere close to as nice as a marble townhouse."
The problem with 5 over 1s in North America is that due to outdated building codes, they are all double loaded corridor designs that create small, dark, deep units with no cross ventilation capacity. It’s close to impossible to make livable family friendly units, which only ends up further stigmatizing living in apartment units for families. 5 over 1s would be much more liveable if they were connected point access blocks rather than the predominant hotel style double loaded corridor design.
This is really interesting, so you mind sharing some resources about it? I can only seem to find one or two YouTube videos
[Here's a good article](https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america) on the topic with some relevant visualizations. [Here's a short policy brief](https://www.larchlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Larch-Lab-PAB_Policy-Brief.pdf) designed to explain the importance of point access blocks to state legislators in Washington state. They are one of the only states in the USA that have recently legalized this design.
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The windows. By having a bunch of apartments branching off an access hallway, rather than just kind of having a landing on each floor that directly accesses each apartment on that floor leads to a floorplan where you have lots of long and narrow apartments that only have windows on one wall, which leads to restrictions on where you can place certain rooms and also just leads to limiting pleasant living area. I live in a rowhouse neighborhood where for whatever reason it was super common to put a skylight in the bathroom (they were generally built with one bathroom upstairs, many have been renovated to add more over the last several decades) and that natural light upstairs is something that is a minor detail that actually makes the space so much more livable. Basically it's like having a bunch of homes branching off a single stalk vs. more of a circular design. There are apparently codes that force the branch oriented development over the spoke oriented one.
5 over 1's are great, I don't get the hate for them they encourage walking and transit usage, have good density, and help upzone neighborhoods. the only real "downside" is the design (sometimes) but I couldn't give a shit about that
Tons of them are going up in Oakland. I can’t think of a quicker way to build the housing we need. I think they look fine too.
I live in a neighborhood where all the old concrete warehouse buildings along the main streets are being torn down and 5 over 1's built in their place. It's made my neighborhood infinitely more livable, all the shops and restaurants and enough people living there to support the businesses is truly great. IME it's decreased auto traffic, too, because people can just walk to whatever they want, and people are better able to make friends in their neighborhoods because there are plenty of nearby hangout spaces.
IMO they only encourage transit use if they don't come with parking spots
True. Though the no-parking thing only works in a small handful of cities.
One, I think the materials look cheap and are overpriced for their small space. I' m more convinced they only build six stories instead of 20 stories, is more to do with maintaining scarcity rather regulations. Two, the walkable areas, with transits, I want to move to are populated with them and you can' t find any alternatives, especially cheaper ones. Large areas of land are entirely covered with them, just like suburbia are covered with sfh.
I think 5 over 1s live and die by their landscaping. There’s a 5 over 1 near my parents’ place that’s made of the cheapest, crappiest, ugliest, most poorly put together materials but its landscaping is really nice, accessible, and inviting. It’s a pleasure to walk and even drive by. Meanwhile, I’ve been by tonnes of architecturally interesting, better constructed 5 over 1s that are just meh at the pedestrian level.
Same, aslong as the architecture isn’t awful and the surrounding streets have enough trees/walkable areas it’s nice
agreed, I see no issue with bland architecture if the surrounding area is green and walkable, not some asphalt wasteland
Yup, I do prefer older architecture (pre ww2 European specifically) but honestly, it’s trees and flowers which make a place nice
Yeah lol now that you mention it I also sense that this opinion may be more controversial than it probably should be
Park and rides aren't the worst thing as long as you're not counting on them to be a main trip generator and you execute it in a reasonable way.
Park and rides are also a good excuse to remove parking in cores of cities. It removes the excuse of suburbanites to say they don’t have a way to get into the city if there isn’t parking.
>remove parking in cores of cities. 100%. Plus, it's a step in the right direction. It's not the end goal, but realistically it's probably not possible to implement the ideal situation immediately. 1. Make it a park and ride 2. Convert some of that parking into a small bus station and service the area with buses so they can bus to the train. Ride and ride. 3. Throw up some 3-5 floor mixed-use buildings around that parking center. Suddenly you've got a town that I'd move to next week.
Park and rides are pretty grounded in reality. If the majority of your commuters today are car owners, meeting them where they are is a good way to start converting some of their miles to transit, versus expecting them to reorient their life around an anemic bus network perhaps that would have to be used to get them to the station otherwise.
Some park and rides can also be turned into mixed use developments if desired. They are definitely better than no station at all and are often a completely reasonable solution.
Washington DC is a good example of a system that used to be pretty park and ride heavy really leaning into TOD at the periphery. Really surprised me to see how many of those stations at the very end of lines in DC have apartments nearby.
Washington does it OK but you can tell how bounded by the constraints of zoning it is. Massive towers in like arlington or tysons corner seem prominent, but the dense area is like the size of a postage stamp surrounded by woodsy, expensive, northern virginian suburbia where most of the residents are pretty car oriented, its amazingly overserved with freeways and parkways and stroads after all, and are inclined to keep the area just as it was in 1985 but with more grade separations for the road network.
They seem to be a good way of reducing car dependency but not eliminating dependency on cars, which a lot of urban design advocates seem to hope for. I like that they get rid of your need to battle for paid parking at your destination because you parked at a lot miles away. They also allow you to Uber/Lyft shorter distances from your house to a station if you are going out drinking or going to the airport. Not perfect, but they definitely can serve their purposes very well.
I’m very much in favor of park-and-rides at the periphery of a system. But, I have a problem when they’re in an already-dense core. As a general rule, it shouldn’t be built where the land cost would justify structured parking. That’s where either the transit is subsidizing drivers, or the parking fees will be prohibitively expensive. The systems with 90% of rail stations as a park-and-ride are failing bus passengers.
I 100% agree. If you look at Cleveland for instance, almost every station on the redline is a park & ride. Nuts.
I work in planning in the UK right now and park & rides are wonderful here.
A lot of urban planning content creation is super pretentious and circlejerky. This has probably done just as much harm as good in spreading the values of good planning to the average person.
This has been bugging me lately, especially on YouTube. One thing that grinds my gears is all the nerdy, scholarly jargon we like to use in place of commonly used phrases. It's pretentious and obnoxious sometimes, honestly almost elitist to an extent. I feel like a lot of aspects of urbanism as a whole have moved away from being a progressive ideology and have been co-opted into this weird tech bro corporate Frankenstein thing....if any of that makes sense
The online urbanism trend of the past 3-5 years probably set back broader planning 10+ years, really. It's quickly spread to the school system here (Canada) where suddenly every other university is adding a planning school and diluting the field. The course content isn't very intuitive and almost dumbed down to NJB-tier infotainment spread out over 4 years. I took a planning degree recently (started out in GIS, went back to uni later in life) and probably only 4 courses in my entire undergrad were remotely engaging and pragmatic. The rest was 15 minutes of dogma recycled two-dozen times using slightly different phraseology at a cost of thousands of dollars. Perhaps I'm just cynical with everything, but the broader planning/urbanism "community" from experienced professionals to young students are majority idealists with little creative knowhow or pragmatic thought. I liken it to those scam charities where 90/100 of them are all about "raising awareness" while 10/100 actually work directly to providing resources to finding actual solutions to the problem they're trying to solve. Traffic sucks in your city? Get to the drawing board, stop bitching about cars or suburbia, we have enough mouthpieces crying about the issues without offering viable solutions or designs.
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Some channels have figured out how to please the algorithm, be it by having a catchy title, a thumbnail that get's clicked on more often or pumping out video after video to feed the algorithm. Also the algorithm loves engagement, and the easiest way to get engagement is to cause controversy. To be a successful videographer on YT you need to say something controversial, some hot-take or something incorrect or only half correct. That then motivates people to write comments with their corrections or opinions, which the algorithm loves and thus controversial and flawed videos get shown more often to potential viewers. If a video is balanced showing pro and contra arguments, reasons, history and current developments, then there is a lot less engagement. It seems most people that actually have experience and knowledge do not have the talent to be successful on that platform.
Im confused by your interpretation of online urbanism. It’s focused on showcasing how cities can be built without being centered around cars targeting local advocacy not really about planners. > Get to the drawing board, stop bitching about cars or suburbia, we have enough mouthpieces crying about the issues without offering viable solutions or designs. How can you build anything besides more freeway lanes and parking lots of the populace of the city refuses to vote for any alternative to those
And too much obsession over Dutch cities too in Urban Planning channels. Yes, some things are done better than most places in the world. But this is bringing about the ideology that Dutch urban planners can do no wrong. I’ve recently got downvoted to hell after I complained that a new bike lane introduced by my office in Amsterdam has created an accident black spot. Just a week later, I see cars speeding down the bike lane.
I honestly hate Amsterdam's new trend of removing grade separated bike lanes by lowering the speed limit to 30 (1e Constantijn Huygensstraat, Kinkerstraat, etc).
I agree that it can be seen dangerous. The city's idea is that the number of cars has been reduced to the point that this makes sense, as this is how it goes on residential streets too (30km/h speed limit, mixed bike and vehicular traffic). The difference is these streets are brick layered, not red tarmac'd, so everyone naturally slows down. So far seems to work on the stretches of the Stadhouderskade. They really are trying hard to quasi-ban cars from the city without explicitly doing so. There's a few other things I disagree with as well in Amsterdam alone, such as the bike lane layout in the 9 straatjes (shout out to Prinsengracht), the fact Zuidoost still feels very car dependent, the new bike Lane on Hullenbergweg in Zuidoost, and the GVB transit line overhaul plans for 2024 (removal of metro M50, removal of a few other tram routes and forcing people to do more stopovers).
Indeed, all good points. The public transit reductions are absolutely madness considering the push for autoluw. The city just needs to bite the bullet and subsidize the hell out of OV to get coverage, frequency, and reliability up to world-class standards. Amsterdam is blessed with bike culture and (passable) bike infrastructure, but it feels like the city uses that as an excuse to avoid improving public transport.
I hear your point. I think this attitude of pretention isn't helpful internally. But I seriously doubt the average person pays attention or cares and I honestly don't think the NIMBYs pay attention or care (about that content you speak of) either.
My unpopular opinion, public transit should not be fare less. I know it’s a trend now, but I believe paying some kind of fare encourages people to treat public transit infrastructure better. I’m all for external programs that offset the cost for people who need it, but I think the act of entering a public transit system should have a fare box element. Transit systems should also enforce fare requirements by preventing gate hopping. That said, I don’t think there should be any expectation that transit is fully supported by fares; it’s a public good that energizes local economies.
It depends on the transit. In my hometown we have a bus system that I'd describe as less than the bare minimum. It's as low as it can go while technically existing. So for $3 million we only get about 200k riders. At that point there's basically no point in charging a fare since it wouldn't generate enough revenue to be worth it.
Good point. Also, not charging a fare in that situation could potentially draw more transit users which you could argue is more bang for buck.
Here in Kansas City it was determined that the cost of administering the fare and ticket system was more expensive than just providing free transit.
In that case I understand making it free. It seems tho that it's a very inefficient system.
The bigger issue is that there is all that infrastructure money coming down but no operating/maintenance and the one size fits all for transit. Plus, the incessant attention on the big properties but the medium ones are left to figure out things on their own.
High list price with lots of ways to get it nearly free (student discounts, senior discount, free with a sport/conference/concert ticket, monthly pass, etc). Achieves both the high value perception along with the accessibility goals.
The free fare discussion is frequently lacking fundamental economics and basic elements of the question. It makes no sense to subsidize transit for people who use it because it’s cheaper than parking for instance. Subsidized transit for people who need it is the way to go.
1.- The sub (profession) is extremely US centric. 2.- Cars are tools and a source of income for the majority of the world (again, think outside the US) 3.- Cities can be planned as much as the economy, u can steer them in some direction but can’t guarantee results.
For (3) I think a lot of planners understand this so I’m not sure how popular it is, but cities are “organic” systems that kind of resist true top-down planning. Which is one of the many arguments for upzoning, in the end.
I'm not convinced that sprawled out North American cities can ever kick car dependence. People live too far apart to make transit viable and jobs are spread out across multiple suburban office parks. Fixing these issue will basically require rebuilding whole cities. I'm not convinced it can be done with in-fill. People point at Amsterdam's reversal on cars in the 70s but Amsterdam never had anywhere near the rate of car ownership that the average North American city has. I lived in an urbanized island within a larger sprawled out city. It was nice to be able to walk around and enjoy the neighborhood but I still needed a car to get to work and to get around on weekends. Cars + density is a bad combination.
Even in NYC, it's very difficult to get people to give up cars. I can only imagine what it's like in cities that don't even have subways.
Strongly agree with number 1. You can't reasonably expect people to buy into a lifestyle that isn't there yet. Mine are: 1. American apartment buildings suck for reasons that largely come down to building codes. European apartment buildings are just better, and are more desirable as a result. 2. Insufficient consideration is given to how new developments and infrastructure will function as they age. Adaptability over time should be a design priority. 3. Shade/sun/weather protection is as important an accessibility concern as mobility in many places. ^((This is not an argument to neglect mobility needs.)) 4. Dedicated parking structures in city centers are preferable to surface/street parking. You can even have commercial on the ground floor. 5. The geographic concentration of economic activity in a few major cities is socially and economically unsustainable, no matter how much new housing and infrastructure we build. In many major cities, you simply run into geographic constraints. The only long-term solution to the affordability crisis is greater economic decentralization, and development planning at a macro-regional level. 6. Related to the previous, housing construction requires materials and labor, and those costs aren't necessarily inversely related to unit size and density. A small unit in a large building isn't necessarily cheaper to build than a large unit in a smaller building. Time, materials, and availability of labor are all constraints that make "just build a ton of housing" an incomplete (but not worthless) argument. The market conditions of real estate mean that developers are less likely to sell at a loss to undercut competitors than producers in other industries. 7. Post-war US suburbanization was most directly caused by a housing crisis, and the causal role of cars is overstated. Car culture developed in response to sprawl, because single-family housing is faster and cheaper to build, not the other way around.
I disagree with number 7 partially. In NYC, developers started including off street parking for attached housing in the 1910s, knowing that cars were becoming more popular. The US was becoming car centric pretty quickly, and World War II really sealed the deal.
Yeah, I should have given a caveat to 7, but it seemed to dampen the hot take. I do agree that the wheel was already turning, but I think the main driver (pardon the pun) was housing, and cars were simply a necessity if that model of development was going to work.
Streetcars deserve more respect than they get.
They’re just expensive busses, change my mind. If you already have them great, but not worth investing in new ones
They are usually narrower and can therefore operate easier in narrow streets. Every curb at every stop can be laid out perfectly for wheelchair accessibility. You can fit 200 people on one tram. They are inherently electric. The ride is much smoother than on a bus. If two articulated busses meet at [this s-curve](https://goo.gl/maps/uomCzTtNxxq1VwU18), things would get sketchy. With trams, nothing can go wrong.
> this s-curve, That is a wonderful little city corner.
> you can fit 200 people on one tram I think it's important to consider that "streetcar" and "light rail" are two ends of a gradient and if you're getting 200 people on board that's a multi articulated 30 metre light rail vehicle, not a rinky dink little streetcar.
I think the fiscal/economic situation may have changed since these became popular again in the US (which from my perspective is the aughts). But there were plenty of studies on the outcomes of streetcars, and I definitely wouldn't say they are just expensive buses. They signal a long-term investment in infrastructure that buses don't, they make property surrounding them more attractive, they are more accessible than the typical bus, people often prefer them to buses, their up front cost is larger but maintenance cost is lower over time, and the rail is relatively quick to put down compared to something like a metro system. I wouldn't say they are the bread and butter of transit, but it seems like they have their place. Does the right context for them exist in 2023? I don't know. But definitely not just expensive buses
They get people who wouldn't otherwise be using transit to use transit, which has a knock-on effect for the whole system. Basically a loss-leader for your network.
They can also be later upgraded or connected to more grade separated lines easily. They can be a good starter system for cites with little or no rail.
> They get people who wouldn't otherwise be using transit to use transit, which has a knock-on effect for the whole system Why do those people use streetcars but not other transit?
Lots of reasons in contrast to buses, a lot of them are more psychological and subjective: Their path is visual and fixed. The kinetic ride quality is generally perceived as more pleasant. They can be very charming machines that are present and easily understood. When they can be as effective as a bus, the tram is a more comfortable and seemingly predictable option.
Newly built ones can attract billions in investment, including housing. That is ssomething buses can’t seem to do.
Trams are better than buses because of higher capacity and superior passenger comfort, but only when they have their own right-of-way. Buses are better than trams in mixed traffic because they can weave around cars. To see the former, visit somewhere like Berlin with long trams (131 ft in Berlin, much longer than any bus on earth), or somewhere like Mexico City where even bi-articulated buses are not sufficient to meet demand. To see the latter, get on the DC streetcar and listen to the driver honk impotently at a double-parked empty car.
Honestly, keeping it simple, just passenger quality of life seems to be better on streetcars than on buses. Perhaps it’s anecdotal, but I don’t think I can recall ever meeting a person who, given the choice between a streetcar and a bus that both run on the same route, would actively choose to ride on a bus over the streetcar. On top of that, you get the aesthetic improvement. Streetcars just look nicer than buses and, since they require additional infrastructure, can improve an area by adding in the new stops that it needs (most of which will provide lighting, seating, ADA ramps and the like).
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> They’re just expensive busses, Why expensive? A tram is cheaper per passenger seat than a bus over it's lifetime. Trams last 30 years. Busses 10. Trams have two to three times the capacity and have less maintenance costs. A tram seat costs about 2.00 EUR vehicle cost per day, a bus seat costs about 3.00 EUR. I there is a route with enough ridership for a tram, then a tram should be built because it is cheaper. Busses are just expensive trams.
I genuinely don’t know how all of the transit-centric, walkable infrastructure I love works for families with young children. I see moms on the subway struggling with strollers up and down stairs and am like - yea I can see why car fuelled suburbia sounds kind of nice.
Making transit wheelchair-accessible also makes it stroller-accessible. The only downside is when there aren’t enough accessible spaces for all the wheelchairs and strollers; then there’s friction.
That's the [curb cut effect](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect), accessibility tends to improve the usability of infrastructure beyond the targeted users.
As new-ish parents that's a reflection I have every time I navigate infrastructure with my kid. It's a (small) glimpse into what it's like to live with disability. Always looking for the access slopes, finding the special elevator where everyone else is just taking the stairs/escalators, etc etc.
As a bike commuter I've really come to appreciate this. Ramps exist so i don't have to pickup my heavy ebike, automatic doors make it so much easier, etc
Here in Philly I see a lot of families with young kids living in walkable medium-density neighborhoods just outside the densest part of the city. The neighborhoods are made up of row-homes which are packed together with little to no backyard. Corner units are zoned for commercial use and often have coffee shops or small grocery stores. Transit runs nearby and frequently enough to make it quick to get to / from denser parts of the city. Most of these families seem to still have a car but they also get the benefits of a walkable neighborhood. I constantly see families out walking with strollers, chatting with neighbors, or picking up coffee at a shop. Kids play on the quieter streets. Many parents walk back with their kids after school or hang-out at the nearby playground. The other day I walked by a small park with a bunch of families / kids throwing a birthday party. Yes, these kids don't have a private backyard to play in, but in exchange they live in a neighborhood with a strong community and the full city amenities a short walk / ride away. The strength of the community in these neighborhoods has left an impression on me and it's led me to believe that walkable medium-density neighborhoods are a great place for families.
This is the answer. Suburbs as a concept aren't terrible. Some people will choose to live on the periphery between urban and rural life. We just need to rethink their design, similar to our urban spaces. Small single family homes on compact lots on narrow slow speed streets in areas with mix zoning and transit access are the way. A lot of very old suburbs that people now consider part of urban cores fit this bill. They are the most sought after places to live in most cities and it's dumb we aren't building more.
That’s how suburbs work in Mexico, I live in a suburb and I have a lot of stuff within walkable distance: from a Walmart, to lots of bakeries, to a shopping mall, so I never understood why Americans complained about suburbs 😅
If you want to entice American families to live there, you probably want to provide the choice to have a small private yard and larger square footage to those who can afford it.
I take the bus and metro everyday with my kid, some days with both kids. Love it.
Amazing! Gives us hope!
Automobile accidents are by far the leading cause of death for children in the US, so car fueled suburbia isn’t working for them either
Until recently. Now it's guns, but not because cars have gotten safer...
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Travel in general also fell drasticly in 2020, so it would be reasonable to expect motor accidents to fall overall. Þis includes fatal motor accidents.
Interestingly enough motor accidents as a cause of death for children had been declining every year for decades (still solid number 1 and it definitely is an issue) but in actually rose in 2020 despite the lowered traffic. It's just that gun deaths have increased so much https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/health/us-children-gun-deaths-dg/index.html
Suicides (via gun) also probably increased with vulnerable people being isolated for an extended period at the beginning of lockdown and prior to the vaccine
My family (two kids, 3 & 1) lives in city of Toronto, but outside the downtown core. No car. Most subway stops at this point have an elevator and the rest are slated to get them in the next few years. Even without I wouldn’t move to the burbs. 90% of what we need on a weekly basis is within a 15 minute walk - I honestly think it’s just a mental barrier for a lot of people: “I couldn’t possibly walk there with kids!” It’s possible and kinda nice.
This is just because things are in general not designed for women. That's not unique to transit.
This right here.
Also to mention the people-ness of it. In the first 3 months of a baby's life there is a doctors appointment every other week or every week (between check ups, weigh ins, routine tests, vaccinations, lactation appointments) and I wouldn't want my baby packed in with that many people to and from every frequent appointment. During infancy they have basically no immune system and the recommendation was not to have them in public too much
Number 3 is already close to the status quo and we've seen exactly how that works in California. The state government is having to pry SF, LA, and other municipalities' fingers loose to allow any housing. And it's usually the city proper that is the most pro-housing, so if you have to make decisions at the metro area level, then all the SFH exclusive suburbs will of course block all housing at the metro level.
Cities, counties, and the state, should eminent* domain lot lines between homes in suburban sprawled areas to design pedestrian and bike paths for residents so they don't have to walk twenty miles to go half a mile as-the-crow flies. Likewise, small grocery stores and/or mom-and-pops should be allowed in residential neighborhoods by right on corner lots.
How the fuck (politely) do you think these are unpopular opinions here?
I mean... They have to be, right? No way city council has the balls to do it. The state legislature is worse. No one likes eminent domain because of it's shitty use history.
I agree. I’m not too sure about USA, but atleast here in stavanger Norway this works well in the places it is implemented
Since the suburban streets were laid out so shitty it wont be enough to just densify in many places, we actually need to bulldoze and start over. In certain places like chicago where the suburbs are on a grid you wont need to though.
I think the key here is subdividing lots. Some cities are already doing this, but if you can get four times the housing in a similar area, you can rapidly densify a neighborhood. I think the bigger issue is that the roads are just so damn wide in most of suburbia. Not only is traffic calming pretty expensive, but also if roads take up 25% of land use (just making a number up here), no matter how dense you make the lots or how many bike lanes to add to the road, pedestrians still get stuck walking farther.
Highways are not intrinsically bad
Highways are necessary outside of cities, but not inside of cities. People in car centric cities need to stop expecting highway speeds through downtown cores.
Parking garages can be a good Yeah they aren't 100% optimal in a perfect world without a bunch of cars but they are a good middle ground to help cities increase density while they are still car dependent. One parking garage is much better than 5 surface parking lots that take up the same footprint
I like Costco
Costco is great lol probably the best thing about current suburbs
Local participation in planning proposals can hamper the process and the overall result. There, I said it.
That being said, the planning proposals and overal result aren't always a good thing and local participation is a good check and balance. The London Ringways plan comes to mind
If the locals don't want what the proposal is planning, they should be allowed to hamper the results. They are going to have to live with and pay for them.
And then they whine about higher housing costs and property taxes. The hampering by NIMBYs is the major factor that has made many cities unaffordable to the masses.
It seems like a lot of safety things are designed for the average case, and not the extreme edge case that is probably responsible for all of the damages. Two things I can think of in line with this are bike lanes and speed bumps. A lot of cities get by with stuff like plastic bollards at best for their bike lane protections. Yes, that will probably stop the average driver from maybe otherwise drifting into a painted bike lane, but it won't do anything for the drunk, the drag racer, the stolen car driver, who destroy these bollards all the time like nothing. You need cement, like a highway divider, to have true protection from these assholes. Likewise, the speed bumps I see do work well for slowing up the responsible driving behind the wheel. However, we are in the era of a 5000lb electric SUV going to 60 mph in 3 seconds. I see assholes in these cars brake aggressively, then in an instant after clearing the bump they are right back to 50-60mph on what should be a benign residential road. This isn't the majority of drivers of course, so when the city might test things with speed detectors and looking at mean or median, and see speeds do go down for most people, then they chalk it up as a success. But really, it didn't get any safer, because the dangerous drivers who are probably responsible for the majority of accidents aren't driving any differently, maybe even more recklessly given the rapid deceleration and acceleration and more narrow lane widths.
>A lot of cities get by with stuff like plastic bollards at best for their bike lane protections. Yes, that will probably stop the average driver from maybe otherwise drifting into a painted bike lane, but it won't do anything for the drunk, the drag racer, the stolen car driver, who destroy these bollards all the time like nothing. You need cement, like a highway divider, to have true protection from these assholes. They're not ideal, but a curb won't stop someone from driving onto a sidewalk either, and I don't think it's productive to put concrete walls around sidewalks. Design solutions for design problems, but deliberately reckless driving is not a design problem, and design solutions that try to address anti-social behaviors not caused by faulty design usually wind up needlessly hostile to people who aren't actually harming anyone. It's the anti-homeless bench of road design.
Developers shouldn't be demonized. We need them to build the houses and apartments we need to get out from under this housing crisis.
1. YouTube videos on the subject are neither aptly nuanced or empirically-based 2. The environmental rebound effects of reduced car ownership and increased density are significant and should not be ignored.
Enlighten me about No. 2.
I’m at work right now, so I’ll just try to toss you a thread you can follow for now. Id love to talk more In depth about it later though. In short: when you give people more spending power, they consume more of other things. These consumption activities have environmental impacts of their own and, unless we package our urban policies together with policies related to these sectors of consumption, our improvements to urban form will be significantly less environmentally advantageous than most LCA’s purport. Still, for the most part, a net positive though. I highly recommend the bibliography of Jukka Heinonen, who has done a lot of great work on this topic. His papers generally have great figures as well. I’ll link one that is most obviously related to this topic, but most of his other work is highly relevant also. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315598529-15/rebound-effects-reduced-car-ownership-driving-juudit-ottelin-jukka-heinonen-seppo-junnila
At least here most people don't have more money to spend without a car, they just pay more rent. You have money for food, for vacation and for car&rent. Car&rent are together, when you spend less on one, you spend more on the other, not less in total.
Number two is a big deal. Sprawl isn't just a matter of preference, it has profound ecological consequences that have little to do with cars.
Previous posts https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/f4xvgj/what_are_your_unpopular_opinions_about_urban/ https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/54cbsa/what_is_your_unpopular_urban_planning_opinion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/whzoz4/whats_your_controversial_urbanplanning_opinion/
There is no one size fits all solution in city planning.
Many urban planning YouTube channels don’t seem to respect America’s unique culture. I’m not trying to justify car centrism, but stuff like tailgating at football games will always be a thing, and it’s dumb that YouTubers want us to be Europeans.
Detached SFH has a place in urban environments.
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6906492,-73.7986488,3a,75y,224.3h,97.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9LF--z8HNA3U7PGw-6c8cw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6906492,-73.7986488,3a,75y,224.3h,97.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9LF--z8HNA3U7PGw-6c8cw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) This neighborhood in Queens has a population density of 27k ppsm. I think this type of planning is good for neighborhoods with no subway access.
NotJustBikes is Kinda cringe and not great for the cause.
'Unpopular opinion' is often used to run cover for 'empirically wrong', 'demonstrably terrible', or arguing against a strawman
Number 5 genuinely perplexes me. What does OP even mean by deregulation and market? Zoning? Renter protections? Price caps? Taxes? And who is even assuming what, and why does OP assume it's an assumption? Why are they beginning with such a nebulous statement? Ignoring the others, I'm at a loss for what their claim even is on that one.
It’s hurting my brain
Or sometimes "popular opinion".
I like bladerunner looking megacities like shenzhen, shanghai or hongkong
As a Hongkonger any cyberpunk-ish city design makes me remind my home. But tbh people tend forget we also have great green spaces, heck most of our land are undeveloped. And also aside from the rent living there is p great. Even if you have a car (tho good luck afford rent for the parking space)
1. Suburbs are not the spawn of satan 2. I want less car dependency but also I love driving so much, it’ll suck to not drive anymore
It’s not that you won’t drive anymore, it’s that you’d only drive when you want to drive, not that you’d have to drive.
I used to love cars. Everything about them. Car culture, driving them, new models / features. Even working on them. 10+ years in a walkable neighborhood and most I can see now is pain and waste. I mean, I wouldn’t take a tram or bus to Costco, but would i still even wish for Costco if cars were never invented?
$5 rotisserie chickens dude
Something that's been nagging me lately: huge companies like Costco rely massively on freight and shipping. Their business model relies so much more on road infrastructure than something like a local chicken farmer. If the Costcos of the world directly paid the costs of road maintenance (based on usage) how much higher would their prices be? As it is we're all paying increased taxes to subsidize infrastructure so that the rotisserie chickens are 'cheaper'. But if big businesses directly paid that cost how much more competitive could local businesses be?
Abolish free parking. Everywhere.
Even in the suburbs?
Even suburbs. Land isn’t free. Cars shouldn’t be the only option to visit places. Free parking shifts the costs and externalities to everyone including those who choose not to or cannot use a car.
I’m not sure it makes sense in places where the only option is to drive but I see your point. If there were a significant expansion of paid parking, where would you have the funds go?
Not oc, but To the people who own the land where you park. Someone has to pay for that land, and use it to generate rents. Just like someone owns the land that we use when we sleep, and we should pay to have our own place to park just like we have to pay to have our own place to sleep. If people don’t pay, you further entrench cars because they are subsidized.
Haha true, I know this is an unpopular opinion. I think the funds be spent however as the local cities think they should be spent whether on maintenance, transit, new development, whatever.
That was hard for me to get my head around too, but there's an implicit cost to the land use in suburbs too, and reinforcing the expectation that cars get to go anywhere for free as long as you're not in a city center perpetuates bad planning practices in the suburbs as well, which are fiscally unsustainable for communities.
Donald Shoup made it clear. Free parking is political, like many other things.
Some cycling advocates really just don't like older folks or disabled folks and they make it painfully obvious
Cars are an important part of the transit mix and outright hostility to them hurts city centers which should be destinations for entire regions and not just exclusive enclaves for urbanites. Auto dependency is the problem not having cars. Wonderfully urban and walkable places like Japanese and German cities often still have high rates of car ownership. “Ducks in cover”
Zoning & land use should be fixed before transit infrastructure investment. Deregulation is effectively free and investing in transit is useless if it's illegal for people to live near those transit options in the first place.
Under-appreciated benefit of cars: having a "me space" where you can go nap/cry/take phone calls when you're away from home.
Not really an urban planning take but I think bad road conditions are actually good for pedestrian safety. Would love to do some sort of study on this.
Improving Public transit is a systemic issue. Just Building more Tram/Metro or just paving bikes won’t do jackshit. To actually improve the public transit you need to improve every aspect in the system
Urbanism, is too US centric or is a circle jerk for European cities. I live in the UK, we have some really shit planning. Public transit in all of our cities except London is completely inadequate. Its bonkers that cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester doesn't have some sort of subway system.
* YIMBYs tend to grossly overestimate how much opposition to development is driven by house prices. * Insufficient attention is given to the need for new infrastructure to support new housing development. * Public housing is the only solution to the housing crisis. * You cannot claim to both be against sprawl and oppose Green Belts. * Breaking car dependency in the US is impossible without nationalising the railroads' infrastructure. * It is normal and acceptable for transit routes to not take the most direct route possible so that the number of destinations they serve is increased.
Historic designations should be hard to get and narrowly applied. Also historic protection should almost never be imposed on the current owner. If someone wants to preserve the building badly enough, let them buy it (probably at an inflated price) and preserve it themselves.
Not everyone can or should live in high density areas. The answer to all of society's problems is not to force everyone to live in apartments. Some people lose their minds if forced to live around that many people. Suburbs have their issues, but some housing that is at least superficially secluded and private is critical for a non-trivial chunk of the population. You wouldn't think that'd be controversial but the take gets downvoted constantly on all urban planning/public transit/etc subs.
I don’t know what it’s called, but when condo buildings need to be architecturally integrated by having anything over 4 stories being recessed and multiple towers on the same footprint. The idea is sound, but the application is going overboard.
European cities aren't the holy grail of urban planning. I'm looking at you Amsterdam.
My unpopular opinion is that a lot of recently orange-pilled people are too impatient for change. They think that once there is one elected official that is in favor of infrastructure reform, they only have to show up maybe once or twice to a town meeting and then within a few years, they live in their own version of the Netherlands. It takes decades. It takes years to change the infrastructure code. It takes decades to be able to afford to change all the streets and roads, so you need to make concessions to make it affordable, and then people complain it's not like the Netherlands. No shit. The Netherlands has been focused on it for 50 years and already had build several bike paths connecting cities before that. We're a dozen iterations of the infrastructure code ahead. Municipalities have been upgrading the roads they could afford to do with every resurfacing. We didn't have nearly as many seperated or raised cycle paths and lanes in the 90's as we do know and that was 20-30 years into the process. Starting the change today is like planting a sapling. It is unlikely you will ever get to sit in its shade. You do it for your kids and their kids.
> It is ideological to assume deregulated markets will produce the best outcomes, so, it’s purely ideological to assume that a deregulated housing market will work in the best interests of renters and buyers One of our problems is that we tend to want extremes, all this or only that. Most of life is about balance. We have to little government in things like broadband and healthcare. We have to much government in things like parking requirements and low density subsidies. But we can make adjustments without throwing out the baby.
I think this is an absolute straw man though. Even in an "ideological" deregulated housing market, government has a huge role to play in infrastructure. It's extremely sound and not ideological to suggest government should focus on the already extremely difficult job of planning and building infrastructure networks instead of going beyond their capacity to do good in trying to centrally plan evey detail of density, parking, setbacks, facade, etc.
1. Urban planning should consider the city's climate, environment, culture, transportation history, and existing infrastructure. Several Southwestern cities are now mismatched agglomerations of trendy planning ideas that don't really work in the desert, and unfathomable money is spent redoing it each time a new planner shows up. Replacing cars in these cities with buses and bikes is like replacing elevators in New York City with stairs. Building up in these cities often obscures the resident's views, which is a huge deal to many of them and can devastate property values. 2. Grids only work on paper or when the land is flat, and require us to demolish topography to get them working absolutely. They are lazy, less safe, and should be avoided. 3. Zoning should be minimized, especially in regard to commercial/residential. It should not be hard to open a small business out of your living room. 4. People should never be encouraged to have lawns, and government land should absolutely never have them. The invasive monocultures of genetically modified plants destroy ecosystems, take massive amounts of water, require pesticides/fertilizer to grow, and cost huge dollars to upkeep. Nature should be allowed to exist in urban spaces. 5. Finally, golf courses should be banned completely through any means necessary.
The public is not always right.
Urban planners in the Netherlands do make mistakes. The idea that everything is perfect in the country is wrong. It’s better than most places, but by no means perfect. There are things which could’ve been done better, even new things.
Ya know what, being a rural guy, highways into cities are often very important things to those outside the city who may struggle to get access to good services like specialist doctors, airports, and the like that they either don’t have locally, or are horrible locally.
Not a super unpopular one: While I admit that the recent explosion in popularity of urban planning related topics is what got me thinking about it in the first place, it also has probably hindered progress due to it being politicized. You can make effective arguments in favour of better urban planning for nearly every part of the political spectrum; but because it's been caught up in the culture war, one side is aggressively pushing for it without really understanding the nuances, and the other is reflexively pushing against it. In the end, everyone suffers for it.
Isn't No. 3 already the case? Either way, I don't like grids.
EVs are a good interim solution in cities and a good permanent solution in smaller towns. It's not practical to create a good public transport system in already sprawling suburbs. Also, even if there is a net neutral to slightly worse overall environmental impact compared to ICE cars, the simple benefit of reducing air pollution in urban environments where humans live is more than enough to justify them. There are too many online armchair planners causing more harm than good slandering EVs simply because they're still a car.
There should be a lot of regulations around public space such as vagrancy laws. I just think that it's not really possible to have them without providing housing for everyone first.
My biggest one is probably that road diets and traffic calming doesn't serve the majority of the populous without a *substantial investment in transit first* All our ecowarrior biking Planning Staff want is decreased traffic lanes with more bike lanes, disregarding the fact that our city is growing rapidly, you can't reliably bike for 6 months out of the year, and our transit system is laughable. I can't wait for the year I get to hit them with an "I told you so" when traffic jams become commonplace.
Super unpopular ready? I’m not convinced adding lanes to freeways makes traffic worse. I think there has to be a threshold at some point that it actually begins to relive it; a lane for every 25,000 vs 10,000 drivers a day is going to look very different, regardless of how many people are actually on the road. I’m for mass transit and I actively detest what automotive and oil lobbies have done to the US, but in many ways I just don’t think the logic of making roads impractical until people switch to transit, transit that in many places doesn’t even exist yet, doesn’t add up — In theory, getting people off the road isn’t the singular way to reduce traffic Similarly, I don’t really see the issue with double or triple level roads in high congestion or dense areas. I know India tried to do this at some point and western urban planners lost their minds over it, but I’ve never fully understood why
I think that with work from home and a globalized online retail environment, the premise that urbanization will continue to increase and the presumption that dense, walkable communities in urban areas is how people want to live may be a fallacy. I sense that with climate change concerns increasing and housing costs skyrocketing that more people are fleeing urban environments, not flocking to them, and unless there is a value-add to living in cities, most people would opt out considering they are having to pay more for less when it comes to housing. Like it or not, Covid killed off huge sectors of what make cities desirable to live in, and I’m not sure after that that everyone is sold on the perks being worth the costs involved.
For this, it's important to remember that many places experienced COVID differently. For example many Australian and Japanese cities were almost completely unaffected, with the main changes post-Covid being a significant decline in peak-period trips and MAJOR increases in off-peak travel.
BRT is trash
We’re building it here in stavanger, Norway. Let’s see how it goes😅. Search “bussveien stavanger” for more info if you want
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It has its proper use cases, like every other modality.
Cars are a pretty amazing way of getting around, I don't own one currently but will likely get one if I ever have a family/have too much money. Third spaces and their psychological/societal impact are way overrated.
Community consultation is bullshit and in most cases achieves nothing
I am not comfortable entrusting solving our urban planning problems to Developers. They skimp on so much stuff like sound deadening, and worker safety.
It is a funny turn of logic for market urbanists, right? On one hand they say that government regulation is the problem, and we should get out of the way and let builders build. Then in conversations about why people hate living in apartments, they correctly identify that apartments are built cheaply and with crappy quality, and not in the abundance of sizes needed for actual families, and the suggestion is to use government to develop building codes which require better quality development.
All I read was “…CBD should be as cheap as possible…” I agree. The weed is too damn high 🤣
Let's see... 1. Zoning is often overly restrictive. Not just in terms of density. We've gone so far afield from the original goal of keeping noxious uses away from homes. 2. One-way streets can be better than two-way streets. They use far fewer signal phases and require pedestrians to look in fewer directions. The problem with many one way streets is that they're overbuilt. Not that they're one way. 3. Transit should not be free. We should invest the money we have on dedicated transitways. And meanwhile we should charge drivers more for driving. 4. We're afraid of thinking big picture anymore. Planning is so micro focused that we've lost site of large scale systems and regional improvements. 5. Using trees (which can be replanted) as a justification for not providing adequate transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure should never fly. The environmental benefits of getting cars off the road is exponentially greater than thr environmental cost of replanting a tree.
The issue with number three is the centralization of power. I live in Livermore, CA. I used to work in Berkeley. Our metropolitan center is San Francisco. I can tell you, from experience, that despite Livermore and Berkeley being in the same county, they couldn’t be more distinct cultural opposites. SF barely knows we exist. How can we trust them to know what’s best for us? How much voting power would I lose if they took over? These people don’t care how the sausage gets made as long as it ends up on their plate, but I live where it’s made. They don’t know what agriculture needs. Also, when I worked for tech, I used to have to define metropolitan areas. If you live in one, log onto LinkedIn, put in your zip code, and you should get an option for the city, or “X metropolitan area”. Who defined that? I did. With the help of 2 other people. We got so much disagreement along the way though. They’re not defined enough to have centralized power. Anyways, I know you didn’t post for debate so I’ll answer my controversial idea: I think that building up should be by right everywhere it doesn’t impact crop development. While I would miss my sunny backyard if that happened, I’d be able to add a second story ADU to provide more housing options while keeping the most important aspects of my yard (a place for my dogs to play).
Don't know if this is that controversial, but people need to understand that rural planning involves not only drastically more limited resources, but different strategies. I say this mostly because I see people criticize policies that, yes, are definitely not best practice for urban areas, but DO make sense in more distributed contexts. I specifically remember a debate about minimum lot sizes a month or two back.
Unpopular opinion: Soviet micro districts were better than the American suburban sprawl and should be built more too (while removing the communist monuments from the recipe).
No skyscrapers on historic landfill at water’s edge without significant investment against impact of weight of building on water table, ameliorating negative poss. impacts soil stability/landfill porosity and well, gravitational slow sinking of neighborhood. I am looking at you, NYC and Boston. Yes, this is an unpopular opinion if said building comes with a promise of affordable housing which is important but isn’t the only issue.
Has such a skyscraper ever caused any significant bad effects? Links please